Here's the thing. My old Q9550 box with 8Gb was not greased lightning, but if I rendered the timeline it previewed nice and smoothly. The new box is:

3930K @ 4Ghz

32Gb DDR3 1666

GTX 570

256Gb SSD OS

300Gb Velociraptor project drive

Two 1Tb and one 2Tb internals and two 1Tb USB3 externals. (no raid)

I enabled the GTX 570, and with MPE turned on there are not many red bars in the timeline, but I rendered it anyway. But it is nowhere near as as smooth as the old box when playing the rendered preview as with the old box. It is loosing frames and catching up with a jerk.

As I type this I am thinking that I have got everything running from that single project drive. Should I be spreading the load, and if so how should I set things up? I have a feeling that if I switched MPE to software only, and rendered the timeline again, it would take much longer, but would preview without the stutter.

I tried exporting to the SSD and that produced a perfectly watchable file - albeit an over saturated one.

When you build a new system, the first thing you need to do is tune Windows. Remove the Sidebar, MSN, and other non-sense crap, turn off compression and indexing on all disks, set unneeded services to manual or disabled, following the Black Viper suggestions.

You have a very nice new spec, and I think that things will work a lot better with some drive reconfiguration. A single Velociraptor is slower than two 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 for the purposes of a project drive. I'd suggest configuring the two 1TB drives as a RAID 0 and trying the VR 300GB for your media cache and media cache DB. Finally, do your exports to the single 2TB internal. And, if that does not work really well, try moving the media cache and media cache DB to the 3TB and just ignoring the VR all together (throughput is likely better for the 3TB is better than the VR). Finally, I'd point Windows paging (virtual memory) to the 256GB SSD OS drive.

Regarding full renders, that could possibly even make things slower with a drive that cannot keep up with the rest of your build. Yes, rendering will make things smoother with a lesser CPU/GPU system, however the drive speed becomes the critical link.

Regarding tweaks to your system, I'd just turn off compression and indexing on all disks and ignore the rest of the possible tweaks for now (and possibly forever!); since you have lots of CPU, GPU, and RAM, you probably will not be buried by various services, etc. once you get your drive bottleneck issues resolved.

I have tried a few things including having Task manager open on my second monitor, and the CPU hardly went over 10%, and only a fraction of the RAM was being used. I also had Speccy monitoring the GPU on the second monitor, and its temperature remained completely stable at 42°, so I'd guess that none of that hardware is being taxed, and you guys are right about the bottle neck.

I have checked most of my drives, but don't have anything to gauge the results against. The SSD hardly lit a fire according to Crystal, but in real world terms, apps open a moment after you click their icon. The 2Tb did OK, but from what I have read here, I suspect its almost empty state had a lot to do with that. I am currently moving the data from the two 1Tb drives to the 2Tb drive, and with fingers crossed, will attempt to set the two 1Tb drives as Raid 0 using the X79-UD5 onboard, and use that as the Project drive for source video, and the 300Gb Velociraptor for exports. I am just a bit nervous about setting up the raid though.

BTW I had done some of the system tweaks, but did not go mad, and as I said above, the CPU is not even close to maxing out.

Since posting the above I had tried to implement a raid 0 from the X79-UD5 MB but could only see one of the two 1Tb drives I wanted to use in the BIOS, so came back out of the build raid area and found I could no longer boot the system. It took me a while to fix because I could see what I thought was the boot order, but it did not show my SSD OS drive. I eventually found it in an other part of the BIOS under legacy devices along with my other drives. So when they built my box the drives were connected without any real plan or regard to best practice.

I was reluctant to get inside the box, so implemented a software raid 0 from Disk Management, which in fact gave me much better read times, but appalling write times:

I am out of my depth here, but am guessing that the above poor write times have somthing to do with the two drives spread across Intel and Marvell sata headers. Bottom line is that I tried it anyway, and the timeline was WAY smoother. Not completely fixed, but enough to prove that my problem was definitely drive throughput. Would the raid work better from the BIOS, and with both drives connected to either the Intel or Marvell sata hearders? The place that built the box is closed until the 9th January, so I guess I am going to have to work it out myself.

I was reluctant to get inside the box, so implemented a software raid 0 from Disk Management, which in fact gave me much better read times, but appalling write times:

I am out of my depth here, but am guessing that the above poor write times have somthing to do with the two drives spread across Intel and Marvell sata headers. Bottom line is that I tried it anyway, and the timeline was WAY smoother. Not completely fixed, but enough to prove that my problem was definitely drive throughput. Would the raid work better from the BIOS, and with both drives connected to either the Intel or Marvell sata hearders? The place that built the box is closed until the 9th January, so I guess I am going to have to work it out myself.

Trevor, you definitely want to have your RAID 0 on one controller chip, probably the Intel chip. I am not a CrystalDisk Mark user but will see what I can do on my Gigabyte Z68 board. I do not know if they are in this week but if you do not mind paying a little Eric at ADK could probably help you out reasonably.

Thanks Bill. I was not particularly happy about committing two 1Tb drives to a raid0, so have just ordered a second 300Gb Velociraptor. When that arrives I'll swap some of the SATA connections round to put both 300Gb Velociraptors on the Intel header, and see how that goes. BTW I am in New Zealand so not handy for ADK.

Because we at the no-cost PPBM5 can not currently afford to test the new systems ourselves we find it difficult to techincally explain Cristobal's fantastic results. Until some else can duplicate this tremendous good MPEG2-DVD encoding score there remains a little grey area on this result. We sure hope it can be duplicated as it is great advance for new NLE machines. Harm has added a new filter capability for i7-39xx CPU's. And for CS5.5 the MPEG2-DVD score the next best score is 53 second compared to his score of 24 seconds

Trevor if you have 64GB OF RAM I tell you exactly how to set up your pc know, I know you will get one more raptor so is nearly the same pc as mine.... RAM Cache is working as a raid controlorer for me, if you see my time in disk test I guees is one of the best , There are some small thing wich are importan to mention.:

Ram cache as ram disk dealy the boot of windows 7 64 pro as each time the pc start the windows have to load all RAM locate for them. I bilive that a solution for that problem could be use windows 7 home edition, so your system will be able to hand only with 16 gb of ram them the rest will be use for Ram disk or Ram cache.

Ram disk it was a bit unstable for me as I got some blue scream but I bilive that as well could be for the same reason, They are made to be use in windows 32bit whit the memory whis is not in use...

I will make a long article for new year for thouse who like to get a perfect balance on their pc´s. overclocking for me is always very important Trevor so keep in mine that is very important to have a good cooling system.

Since the cpu are so powerfull I have to say that the reason to chose a GPU is only for the priview with the mpe and the amount of scream man like to use.

I will never use or recomend anyone to pay more tham 300$ FOR A GPU in order to get grate result whit a proccesor >= i73930 O.C.

I still making more test and Im specting to put down mine time 10% base on pure O.C. As I promise to Harm I will publish result whitout OC and whit varius setting so all can understand and use PPBM as I did to get close to the prefect understanding of comunication in the PC. "REALLY AND NOT ONLY IN THEORY"

That's really interesting Crist, and I have a feeling that Bill's raised eyebrows concerning your PPBM5 score will prove to be misplaced. I have not seen anyone get a 3930K above the 4.8Ghz that you running at, so you may have to look elsewhere for fine tuning your system. Right now I have serious disk throughput problems, but when the other 10k VRaptor arrives I have my fingers crossed that I can fix that. My 3930K is only running at 4Ghz while I am getting the rest of the system sorted out, but I have the Intel RTS2011LC water cooler in a full tower, so will push the processor later on. I was not thinking of running at anything like 4.8Ghz though.

As per the RAM cache, I don't understand the various PPBM5 parameters but surely your use of RAM cache is a part of your extraordinary score, so it would be crazy not to give it serious thought. I won't be taking that route while 8Gb sticks are so expensive - especially after only just investing in eight 4Gb sticks. But a year from now... Who knows?

Have you done the tuning I suggested earlier? Removing MSN, sidebar, games etc. Turning off ccompression and indexing on all drives. Setting unneeded services to disabled or manual. Disabled anti-whatever before starting PR and stuff like that?